Brenda Fassie
"I am a shocker. I like to create controversy. It's my trademark." – Brenda Fassie
A black woman wearing a head wrap, a crop top, and multicolored bangles and necklaces poses with one hand on her hip and the other outstretched.
Content warning for drug use, overdose
Brenda Fassie was a lesbian South African pop star who gained international fame for her work and for the many media storms that built up around her. She was the niece of the famed activist-turned-president, Nelson Mandela, and held many of the same political stances throughout her life. A number of her songs were even banned in America. She was incredibly influential during her lifetime, exchanging the safety privacy could have offered her for dramatically public life.
Brenda Fassie was a “child star.” She knew that she wanted to be a singer from a very young age, and she began pursuing that dream early. She was in many singing groups before gaining real popularity with her band Brenda and the Big Dudes. Their song, “The Weekend Special,” sold enough records to seal her fate as one of the most popular musicians in South Africa at the time. To say she only went up from there wouldn't be quite right; while she did continue to garner fame and awards, her personal life was filled with more than her fair share of struggles.
When Brenda was 20, she had a son with one of her bandmates. In 1989, she married another man, Nhlanhla Mbambo, but the two quickly divorced. After the divorce, she was hit by addiction and struggled with a cocaine addiction for the rest of her life.
Most of the press knew about her struggles, and she never did much to hide them. She discussed her drug use publicly and reportedly took drugs in front of members of the press. This addiction led to what Fassie remembered to be one most difficult moments of her life. She awoke to find her lover, Poppy Sihlahla, had died of an overdose in their motel. After this tragedy, Fassie seemed to change, working intensely with her music and publicly discussing her addiction with a new attitude focused on recovery.
She attended rehabilitation not long after Sihlahla’s death; around the same time, she came out publicly as a lesbian. While there is still much dispute over the term she used to describe herself.
Brenda Fassie used the label lesbian; therefore, that is her label. She had access to other words and could have used them if she thought her identity fit under another term better, but she chose the word lesbian. There is a clear distinction here because while often it is up to the best guess to label people, there is a clear difference between providing new words to describe an old experience and speaking over how people identified themselves.
Sometimes there are difficult calls. The line may be thin at times, but there is a line. In Brenda Fassie’s case, the line is crystal clear.
Though she had relationships with men throughout her life, she described herself as a lesbian. A person can be a lesbian even if they have had romantic or sexual relationships with men in their lives, and it is no one’s duty to override how people describe themselves.
Like her previous relationships with men, she and her girlfriends caused many scandals, but none were too damaging to Fassie’s image. In an interview, she said that her sexuality never affected her career too harshly: “I became more interesting to people.”
Fassie’s fame is never to be understated. She was often called “the Madonna of the Townships,” She responded, “No, no, no sweety, Madonna is the Brenda of America.”
In a rare occurrence for someone who burned so brightly, Brenda’s flame never faded. As is unfortunately too common, though, the vibrant star died far too young at 39. In 2004 Brenda Fassie overdosed on cocaine and slipped into a coma. Thirteen days later, she didn’t return to consciousness when her life support machines were turned off, and she died with her long-term partner Gloria Chaka and the rest of her family by her side.
By the time she died, the circumstances of her passing had been announced, corrected, and misreported so often that it is hard to find the truth of it even now. Thousands of her fans attended the funeral; the crowd was so large that some injuries required hospitalization. In the end, her death was just as controversial and widely reported on as her life.
Because there are so many people who have looked at Fassie’s life, there are many ways to discuss the woman herself. A trap many have fallen into when exploring how her sexuality played a role in her life is the desire to take Fassie as an accurate representation of what life in South Africa was like for queer people at the time, and that is not a correct assumption.
While Fassie was undoubtedly a part of the queer community and deserves to be recognized as such, she did not have the same experiences as many other South African queer people did at the time.
She inadvertently touches on this fact herself in an interview discussing whether she wanted to marry her then-girlfriend, saying, “We’ll get married, when we decide, we will. As a South African music icon, I think I should have my rights given to me.”
And while that was not the case, in the end, it is an interesting comment because it wasn’t legal for same-sex couples to marry in South Africa until two years after her death. This quote is a good representation of the different attitudes Fassie faced because of her fame. She did not experience the same struggles or hurdles that many other queer South Africans did when discovering and publicly discussing their identities. She was a rich and famous woman who was the niece of one of South Africa’s most revered leaders, so her experiences should not be taken as common.
But that is not to say that South Africa was in any way behind in the fight for queer rights; they were the fifth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, and regarding laws, they are pretty fantastic. They have an equal age of consent, anti-discrimination laws in employment and all other areas, legal adoption, the right to change legal gender, and men who have sex with men are allowed to donate blood. Still, there isn’t any “universal” queer narrative in South Africa, and that is because there is no universal queer narrative anywhere.
[Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material]
Brenda Fassie: A very human hero. (2004, May 10). BBC News. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3700309.stm
Brenda Nokuzola Fassie. (2011, February 17). South African History Online. Retrieved from http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/brenda-nokuzola-fassie
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McNeil, D. G. (2004, May 17). Brenda Fassie, 39, South African Pop Star, Dies. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/arts/brenda-fassie-39-south-african-pop-star-dies.html?_r=0
Moorman, M. (2014, June 26). Brenda Fassie’s revolution without harmony. Africa Is A Country. Retrieved from
http://africasacountry.com/2014/06/brenda-fassie-a-revolution-without-harmony/
Olah, N. (2013, December 8). Brenda Fassie: The Woman That Begged Mandela To Sing. Vice. Retrieved from
https://noisey.vice.com/en_dk/article/theres-much-more-to-brenda-fassie-than-her-pro-mandela-anthem
Pantsi, N. (2014, October 5). Remembering Brenda Fassie. The Citizen. Retrieved from http://citizen.co.za/your-life/173557/remembering-brenda-fassie/
Stein, D. (2014, May 9). BRENDA: THE 2003 MAMBA INTERVIEW. Mamba Online. Retrieved from http://www.mambaonline.com/2014/05/09/brenda-the-2003-mamba-interview/
